Butler, Octavia - Dawn

It did not answer, and that frightened her. It released her and led her through the trees, moving quickly. The other ooloi followed, all of them silent, all clearly knowing where they were going and probably knowing what they would find there.

Lilith no longer wanted to know.

She kept their fast pace easily, staying close to Nikanj.

She almost slammed into it when it stopped without warning near a fallen tree.

The tree had been a giant. Even on its side, it was high and hard to climb, rotten and covered with fungi. Nikanj leaped onto it and off the other side with an agility Lilith could not match.

"Wait," it said as she began to climb the trunk. "Stay there." Then it focused on Kahguyaht. "Go on," it urged. "There could be more trouble while you wait here with me."

Neither Kahguyaht nor any of the other ooloi moved. Lilith noticed Curt's ooloi among them, and Allison's and- "Come over now, Lilith."

She climbed over the trunk, jumped down on the other side. And there was Joseph.

He had been attacked with an ax.

She stared, speechless, then rushed to him. He had been hit more than once-blows to the head and neck. His head had been all but severed from his body. He was already cold.

The hatred that someone must have felt for him... "Curt?" she demanded of Nikanj. "Was it Curt?"

"It was us," Nikanj said very softly.

After a time, she managed to turn from the grisly corpse and face Nikanj. "What?"

"Us," Nikanj repeated. "We wanted to keep him safe, you and I. He was slightly injured and unconscious when they took him away. He had fought for you. But his injuries healed. Curt saw the flesh healing. He believed Joe wasn't human."

"Why didn't you help him!" she screamed. She had begun to cry. She turned again to see the terrible wounds and did not understand how she could even look at Joseph's body so mutilated, dead. She had had no last words from him, no memory of fighting alongside him, no chance to protect him. Her last memory was of him flinching away from her too-human touch.

"I'm more different than he was," she whispered. "Why didn't Curt kill me?"

"I don't believe he meant to kill anyone," Nikanj said. "He was angry and afraid and in pain. Joseph had injured him when he hit you. Then he saw Joseph healing, saw the flesh mending itself before his eyes. He screamed. I've never heard a human scream that way. Then he. . . used his ax."

"Why didn't you help?" she demanded. "If you could see and hear everything, why-"

"We don't have an entrance near enough to this place."

She made a sound of anger and despair.

"And there was no sign that Curt meant to kill. He blames you for almost everything, yet he didn't kill you. What happened here was. . . totally unplanned."

She had stopped listening. Nikanj's words were incomprehensible to her. Joseph was dead-hacked to death by Curt. It was all some kind of mistake. Insanity!

She sat on the ground beside the corpse, first trying to understand, then doing nothing at all; not thinking, no longer crying. She sat. Insects crawled over her and Nikanj brushed them off. She did not notice.

After a time, Nikanj lifted her to her feet, managing her weight easily. She meant to push it away, make it let her alone. It had not helped Joseph. She did not need anything from it now. Yet she only twisted in its grasp.

It let her pull free and she stumbled back to Joseph. Curt had walked away and left him as though he were a dead animal. He should be buried.

Nikanj came to her again, seemed to read her thoughts. "Shall we pick him up on our way back and have him sent to Earth?" it asked. "He can end as part of his homeworld."

Bury him on Earth? Let his flesh be part of the new beginning there? "Yes," she whispered.

It touched her experimentally with a sensory arm. She glared at it, wanting desperately to be let alone.

"No!" it said softly. "No, I let you alone once, the two of you, thinking you could look after one another. I won't let you alone now."

She drew a deep breath, accepted the familiar loop of sensory arm around her neck. "Don't drug me," she said. "Leave me. . . leave me what I feel for him, at least."

"1 want to share, not mute or distort."

"Share? Share my feelings now?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Lilith.. ." It began to walk and she walked beside it automatically. The other ooloi moved silently ahead of them. "Lilith, he was mine too. You brought him tome."

"You brought him to me."

"I would not have touched him if you had rejected him."

"I wish I had. He'd be alive."

Nikanj said nothing.

"Let me share what you feel," she said.

It touched her face in a startlingly human gesture. "Move the sixteenth finger of your left strength hand," it said softly. One more case of Oankali omniscience: We understand your feelings, eat your food, manipulate your genes. But we're too complex for you to understand.

"Approximate!" she demanded. "Trade! You're always talking about trading. Give me something of yourself!"

The other ooloi focused back toward them and Nikanj's head and body tentacles drew themselves into lumps of some negative emotion. Embarrassment? Anger? She did not care. Why should it feel comfortable about parasitizing her feelings for Joseph-her feelings for anything? It had helped set up a human experiment. One of the humans had been lost. What did it feel? Guilty for not having been more careful with valuable subjects? Or were they even valuable?

Nikanj pressed the back of her neck with a sensory hand-warning pressure. It would give her something then. They stopped walking by mutual consent and faced one another.

It gave her.. . a new color. A totally alien, unique, nameless thing, half seen, half felt or. . . tasted. A blaze of something frightening, yet overwhelmingly, compelling.

Extinguished.

A half known mystery beautiful and complex. A deep, impossibly sensuous promise.

Broken.

Gone.

Dead.

The forest came back around her slowly and she realized she was still standing with Nikanj, facing it, her back to the waiting ooloi.

"That's all I can give you," Nikanj said. "That's what I feel. I don't even know whether there are words in any human language to speak of it."

"Probably not," she whispered. Alter a moment, she let herself hug it. There was some comfort even in cool, gray flesh. Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair-an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.

She walked more willingly with Nikanj now, and the other ooloi no longer isolated them in front or behind.

7

Curt's camp boasted a bigger shelter, not as well made. The roof was a jumble of palm leaves-not thatch, but branches crisscrossed and covering one another. No doubt it leaked. There were walls, but no floor. There was an indoor fire, hot and smoky. That was the way the people looked. Hot, smoky, dirty, angry.

They gathered outside the shelter with axes, machetes, and clubs, and faced the cluster of ooloi. Lilith found herself standing with aliens, facing hostile, dangerous humans.

She drew back. "I can't fight them," she said to Nikanj. "Curt, yes, but not the others."

"We'll have to fight if they attack," Nikanj said. "But you stay out of it. We'll be drugging them heavily-fighting to subdue without killing in spite of their weapons. Dangerous."

"No closer!" Curt called.

The Oankali stopped.

"This is a human place!" Curt continued. "It's off limits to you and your animals." He stared at Lilith, held his ax ready.

She stared back, afraid of the ax, but wanting him. Wanting to kill him. Wanting to take the ax from him and beat him to death with her own hands. Let him die here and rot in this alien place where he had left Joseph.

"Do nothing," Nikanj whispered to her. "He has lost all hope of Earth. He's lost Celene. She'll be sent to Earth without him. And he's lost mental and emotional freedom. Leave him to us."